Creative Visualization Versus Mental Rehearsal For Runners

As a runner, you might have read or heard about creative visualization. And you may have read or heard about mental rehearsal. Some authors about conducting mix the phrases”creative visualization” and”mental rehearsal” collectively, as if they described the exact same procedure.

But innovative visualization and mental rehearsal are two distinct processes, although both require creativity. Here’s a overview of each process.

The goal of the process is to envision an end-result as vividly and with as much detail and emotion as you can.

As an example, suppose you have an upcoming race where you’ll be running. Then you can use creative visualization to imagine seeing the time about the race clock (a timer, actually, that’s started if the race-start gun is fired) hanging over the finish line as you cross that line.

Creative visualization is centered on the final what — that is, what you want because the end-result. This procedure does not ask you to concern yourself with the how — which is, how you are going to attain the end-result. Instead, this process effectively is all about programming your subconscious mind to”look” for ways to achieve the end-result.

Creative visualization is closely tied to the Law of Attraction, which states that thoughts become things. As an example, if you imagine for a few minutes every day for several days prior to a marathon seeing yourself completing that race in five hours, then you’re much more likely to conduct your race in five hours.

The goal of the practice is to imagine going through the moves of an athletic activity — such as serving a tennis match — as if you were the best athlete in that sport and could execute those moves perfectly.

For instance, assume you’ve a particular hill you know you will need to run up throughout an upcoming race. And assume that you know the way the best runner on the planet would assault that hill. Then you can use mental rehearsal to imagine (to pretend, in different words) being the best runner running up this hill.

Mental rehearsal is focused on the how — that is, exactly how you move your muscles as if you were the very best man in the world at moving those muscles. This procedure places little if any emphasis on the what — that is, what specifically you want to realize.

By way of example, NASA astronauts have utilized psychological rehearsal studio torontoon Earth to envision moving their own bodies in space to achieve certain tasks while in space. And sport psychologists have utilized this procedure to teach athletes the way to swing, hit, run, or carry out any other athletic motion as if they were the top athletes in their sport.

Each process has its own benefits, as you now can see. Put simply, creative visualization deals with all the what and the unconscious mind, and it thoroughly avoids what some call the”cursed” hows. In contrast, mental rehearsal deals with precisely how and developing muscle memory, and it asks you to place little or no attention on what you would like to achieve.